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MIKE PATTON | April 2005 | The Wire

THE LIGHTNING BALL OF ENERGY THAT IS MIKE PATTON SHOWS NO SIGNS OF LETTING UP, AS HE RANGES OVER AN EVER WIDER ARRAY OF HARDLINE MUSIC AND GROUPS INCLUDING FANTÔMAS, TOMAHAWK, MR BUNGLE AND HIS NEW COLLABORATIVE VENTURE PEEPING TOM IN A SEARCHING INTERVIEW, THE VOCALIST REVEALS THE SOURCE OF HIS RELENTLESS DRIVE, HIS THOUGHTS ON HIS FRIEND AND MENTOR JOHN ZORN, AND THE RATIONALE BEHIND HIS ECLECTIC IPECAC LABEL. WORDS: PHIL FREEMAN. PHOTOS: ROBERT GALLAGHER"I go up to Victoriaville, or any other jazz festival, any place where minds are supposed to be as open as they get, and we come out there with one loud guitar, one note and ears turn off. It's Heavy Metal. I exist and my music exists - in a place where it can be snubbed equally by anyone. And God bless it for that."Mike Patton is accustomed to, even genial about, being misunderstood, shrugged off and disdained. As long as he's been in the public eye, he's expressed himself through an array of projects, never giving any hints as to which, if any, is the closest to his heart. In the mid-1990s, he toured arenas worldwide, singing for the funk Metal group Faith No More. At the same time, his spinoff group Mr Bungle was pissing off curious listeners with three wilfully obnoxious albums, each one a collision of genres fuelled by a savage need to shock and distress the unwary, and to make Patton and his buddies laugh. Eventually, Faith No More and Mr Bungle both disbanded or went on hiatus, but Patton didn't settle down - the opposite, in fact. He's spent the last half-dozen years hurling himself in so many directions it's difficult to believe he sleeps. He's amassed an arm-long list of credits, collaborating with everyone from John Zorn and Merzbow to Dan The Automator and The X-ecutioners. His vocals have seasoned diverse releases including Bjork's Medulla, and White People, the latest by Prince Paul's Handsome Boy Modelling School. He's also back to fronting two groups. One, Tomahawk, is the closest he's currently got to a mainstream rock project. His bandmates include ex-members of Helmet and The Jesus Lizard and the group has released two albums on Patton's label Ipecac. The other is Fantômas, an underground all-star quartet featuring members of Mr Bungle, The Melvins and Slayer. They've released four albums since 1998, each one an attempt to break the boundaries of Metal.Fantômas sculpt intense, ambitious music that demands focused listening even as it encourages demented moshing - a combination, a dichotomy, that encapsulates Patton's entire oeuvre.Born in Arcada, California ("Behind the redwood curtain," as he puts it) to a teacher and a social worker, Patton - who now resides in San Francisco describes a restless childhood."It's very easy to get lost, growing up in small towns like that," he says. "You develop a certain nervous energy that sticks with you your whole life and you're always itching to get the hell out of wherever you are. I still have that, even though I'm happy in San Francisco. Maybe that's why I tour a lot, I'm not sure."It's probably got something to do with his leaps from project to project, too. Patton is a highly focused creature of the studio - or the bedroom. He's a pure autodidact, who taught himself the rudiments of multiple instruments, while learning all about production and orchestration from his massive record collection. Like Jim 'Foetus' Thirlwell, he takes time to figure out how to accomplish the sonic task he's laboring over at any given moment. He describes his studio style as "punch it in till you get it right. Nobody's looking."When an idea strikes him, he slaps together a demo tape, then goes hunting for musicians capable of realizing it more expertly than he can. This is also the method employed by Tom Waits, Frank Zappa and Brian Wilson - Californians all.Drawing lines between Patton and Zappa may seem obvious or even intellectually lazy. Mr Bungle's frenetic leaps from disco-funk to free jazz to Metal, often within the space of a single verse of one song, clearly mirrors similarly hyper-caffeinated work by The Mothers Of Invention. But they don't have that much in common really - and, to be honest, Patton's discography might be shallower, but its breadth and the relative absence of smugness make it the greater achievement. Both men - like Waits, Wilson and Harry Partch - are exemplars of California Pop Art (musical department). Patton's willingness to work in any style of music, especially ones he's unfamiliar with, is reminiscent of Zappa's parodic takes on disco, punk and doo-wop; Waits's adaptation of beatnik and hobo personae; and Partch's transformation of hobo graffiti into modern classical music. This sort of wide-ranging cultural appropriation has long been a hallmark of Californian art, whether it be the gas station paintings of Ed Ruscha, the recontextualised Gumby drawings of Raymond Pettibon or the hot rod graphics gone psychedelic and hostile that make up the foundation of Robert Williams's vein-bursting canvases.For the past 15 years, Patton has enjoyed a close and creative partnership with the decidedly non-Californian composer and performer John Zorn. He introduced himself to the saxophonist at a gig in 1990, offering a Mr Bungle demo tape and a request for Zorn to produce the group's first album. Since then, Patton has established himself among Zorn's vast array of collaborating musicians, appearing on many of his albums and releasing two discs of his own on Zorn's label Tzadik (1997's Futurism-inspired PranzoOltranzista and 1999's Adult Themes For Voice). The two men even have a continuing group together- the electronics/sax/vocals Improv trio Hemophiliac with Ikue Mori. Under that banner, they've released a limited edition two CD set and a live CD from one of Zorn's recent 50th birthday gigs at New York's Tonic. The Hemophiliac project has taught Patton an important lesson - that aggression is fine, but it's not necessarily a panacea."Zorn and I felt it was really important, that - we have a great language, we play duo all the time but it's much deeper and moreintense to have Ikue there," he explains. "There really is a difference in approach from the female improvisers that I've played with and the males. And over time, Ikue taught me that it isn't always about attack, attack, attack. What that meant to me in Faith No More... I don't think I knew it then.I was a teenager. I think by our second record, I had it figured out, that there's a world out there and there's a whole lot of other ways to approach what you do."Faith No More had a minor hit with a cover of The Commodores' glutinous ballad "Easy" and many Patton listeners have marveled at the affection for lounge exotica and other seemingly edge-less musical forms that's manifested itself on the Lovage album Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By (with Dan The Automator), and Romances, an experimental album made with Norway's John Kaada. He's got an answer for them."In a weird way, by listening to it, I'm studying it. How is this arranged? Especially with exotica stuff. The orchestration in that music is so dense and so complex and so amazing, if you can get beyond the kitsch. And I can do that in 30 seconds flat. With Les Baxter in particular, the orchestral density of what that guy accomplished never ceases to amaze me. I hear new stuff in there every time I listen."Zorn, with whom Patton has gone on massive record buying trips to the Japan, has clearly been a crucial figure in his life - a good friend and musical mentor."He was probably the first person that I'd improvised with," Patton explains, recalling early sax/vocal duos the two performed at the Knitting Factory and other venues. "No safety net. Naked on stage, where it all could and would and should have gone wrong. Whatyou do is, you listen and interact and hopefully develop a language. One of the many things he taught me was that it can happen. And it can happen with a total stranger. It can happen with someone who's 30 years older than you, or with a small child, but developing that telepathy is special when it does happen."Working with Zorn. whose command of the saxophone is pretty much absolute, seems to have inspired Patton to develop his vocal range and technique. Though he's self-taught in this as in otherthings, the need to keep up with a peripatetic and lightning-fast duo partner has forced Patton to create shrieks and gabbles thatThe Boredoms' Eye might well envy. And the partnership is a two way street. Zorn is clearly enthused by the singer's boundless energy and aggression. Naked City's most punishing album, the ultra-heavy single track Leng T'Che, features thank yous to Patton and The Melvins, presumably for inspiration, in the booklet.Patton recently lent his unique vocalizations to a reworking of Naked City's track "Grand Guignol" which has just appeared in the group's Complete Studio Recordings box set."He said he always intended it to be a piece with a vocal. Actually, with lots of vocals. He described it as a concerto for voice," Patton recalls. "And I think originally he wanted Diamanda [Galas] to do it, and something happened, but he said, 'Hey, this is the way I always intended it and I want you to do it'. He did give me a little bit of direction, but for the most part he said, do whatever the hell you want."Surprisingly, Patton's first version was too nuanced and subtle for Zorn. "Usually, when I'd worked with him and with Naked City, it was about space and contrast. You couldn't put vocals in every section, that's the least dynamic thing you could do. So knowing the way he works, and how from past experience he'd put vocals in every other section, and I'd lay out for a while, whatever, the way I mixed it was very background. He sent it back and said, 'No, no, no, no, no. This sounds great, but [give me] more. He really wanted a blasting - in certain sections, it's just me, like soloist."Zorn has had no involvement to date with Patton's highest-profile project, Fantômas. The group, named after a French detective from an early 20th century series of novels and concurrent films (and later a Mexican comic book hero), is an avant Metal dream team. Buzz Osborne of The Melvins plays guitar Trevor Dunn, formerly of Mr Bungle, is the bassist; and behind the drum kit sits Dave Lombardo, best known for his work with Metal masters Slayer but also the engine behind numerous side projects, including his recent Drums Of Death collaboration with DJ Spooky, and a few Zorn albums {Taboo And Exile, Children's Music.) "It was like writing down a Christmas list, and it wasn't a very deep one," says Patton. "I got all my first choices. I didn't know how they would respond to it. I knew Buzz, but not that well. Trevor was really my only sure thing, he was like the security blanket, meaning if it all went belly-up, I could cry on his shoulder." Lombardo is Patton's ace in the hole - and he knows it. "I saw Slayer a little while ago with Dave, and I'd seen them when I was a teenager of course, and loved it to death," Patton recalls. "But seeing them again, and seeing how effortless that music is to him - I thought I even saw him yawn a couple of times, while bashing his brains out and driving that band."With Fantomas, Lombardo gets to play much more than just the Death Metal blast beats he helped invent. He welcomes the challenge, according to Patton."Over the years, I always thought he was great, but playing with him, and making him jump through every hoop imaginable and watching him do it - he's wide-eyed. Any bizarre suggestion or anything that might be unfamiliar to him - 'Yeah, sure, why not? Let's try it! This is great!' He's just so excited about this stuff that it's energising andempowering."Having a supportive group is crucial (in a 'consent of the governed' sort of way: Fantomas is anything but a democracy). Sure, Patton was assembling a bunch of guys he wanted to make music with, but rather than waiting to see what came out of that creative confluence, he brought them together to perform a specific set of tunes, in a very particular way."Like I do with nearly everything I write, I basically made a rough recording of myself playing all the instruments, which can be very comical. When you're starting a band, it's like a chemical experiment. You don't know how guys are gonna respond, especially to musicthat's as angular and abstract as Fantomas is. I didn't know how Lombardo was gonna hear this. I had no idea." All four of their releases to date have been recorded in the same way: "I write down everything, put it on a tape, and say, 'That's it. Play it. And you know, a lot of it's hard to decipher, so I'll have to sit down with Buzz or Dave and show them exactly what I want, and if there's a part that comes along - well, I'm open to suggestion, let's put it that way. But that music is, more so than any of my other groups, about precision and execution. There is a right and a wrong way of playing it. And I really feel like my rote is to illustrate very clearly what to do and what not to do."The group's self-titled debut from 1999 mimicked a comic book in its structure. It was labelled Book 1. and featured 30 tracks, each named for a page and listing a number of frames, or panels, of action. The only track that didn't follow this pattern was number 13, which was two seconds of run-off from track 12.Patton explains, "I've always been curious about what you can and can't do when indexing tracks on a CD. I wondered if you could skip one. You can't. If you notice, on the CDs, track 13 appears. It goes for one and a half seconds, which is the bare minimum that it can be, and I indexed it at the end of 12 so you barely notice it. But it does appear, for one and a half seconds. I never really got rid of it. And initially, I just thought I wanted to have an idiosyncratic thing on the Fantômas records, and I want to keep it that way every time. I chose 13 for obvious bad luck and protection reasons, and wanted to keep doing it throughout all of our records. But after [2004's] Delirium Cordia, I realised I'd broken the mold, so fuck it."That Fantomas debut, which was also the inaugural release from Patton's Ipecac label, set the mold for the group's future albums. The music has all the precision of Prog rock, but it's as compressed as Grindcore. The longest piece is just over four minutes, the shortest just under 30 seconds. Each track features multiple riffs, which rarely repeat, and there are no solos. During the slower moments, guitarist heaviness as its own reward comes to the fore, as the group burrow into a post-Sabbath trench before launching itself over the top, into another high-speed assault. Patton, for his part, refuses to seize the foreground. His voice is clearly present but it's in the middle of the mix, just one more instrument, and there are no lyrics, only shouted interjections, screams, roars and babble. This was a strategy derived in part (as might be expected) from Yamataka Eye's work with Naked City, but equally from John Tardy's gravel-gargling work on Slowly We Rot, the 1989 debut CD from Florida sludge-Metal unit Obituary. (Tardy, not wanting to have his group pigeonholed alongside the knuckle dragging sadists of the nascent Death Metal scene, chose not to print it. What he was singing was indecipherable. Rather than form words, he howled like a despairing ape, or ranted incomprehensibly like the lunatic nobody wants to sit next to on the bus.)"Believe it or not, you totally nailed it," Patton laughs when I mention Obituary. "When I - how old was I? I was probably 18 or 19 when that record came out. I thought the guy was a fucking genius, because there were no words. There were certain little phrases, 'wuuugh' and 'aaagh' and that really hit me at the time. I realised he was using the voice as an instrument within a song form. Especially with that form of music, that is genius, because no one knows. There's nothing to say anyway. It's a sound. Better than hearing him talk about disemboweling some virgin. Since a lot of it comes from small towns or suburbs, it's really a great undiscovered American music, Death Metal.The second Fantômas album, The Director's Cut (2001), was a little lighter in spirit than the debut collection of 15 movie themes reinterpreted in their fashion, on first listen it feels more of a lark than predecessor, possibly because all-covers projects (even when thematically unified) are frequently the resort of the uninspired. But Patton, through Fantômas, is actually on to something with The Director's Cut. Movie scores, even heard without accompanying visuals, are frequently more dramatic than music originally intended to stand alone. Patton's interpretations of these pieces, which mostly start a little on the sedate side before becoming the squalling outbursts Fantômas fans expect, retain the innate drama of scores, while compressing the music into dense armour-piercing bullets of sound. As on the debut, track lengths run between one and four minutes, and the whole disc contains only 42 mini of music.Despite the thematic connections to comic book and movies made explicit on the first two discs, Fantômas have never made a video, nor even inclined any visual accompaniments to the music on their albums. Patton seems to view this as practically a charitable gesture on his part."I think the music is complicated enough," he says. "There's enough information in there - you wouldn't need any more stimuli with the music, in my opinion. It's already borderline overkill. That's why we make short records, that's why there's no lyrics, no proper words - you can only handle so much information and at a certain point your ears just shutdown. At least mine do."The group's third release, Delirium Cordia, makes this point explicit.It hauls off the shelf on a daily basis. A 75 minute *** composed of dozens of sections but programmed as a single epic track. The music is punctuated by sounds evocative of the operating table - beeps, mechanical respiration and the subdued, businesslike conversational tones of expert surgeons. It's rough going, shifting from thrash to Dark Ambient interlude to jazz-like chording and back through all those sounds and more, for just under an hour, followed by 15 minutes of a needle gently scraping a record's rune groove. Choirs moan softly, gongs ring out, huge gruesome riffs hit like slabs of concrete falling from the sky."I wanted to force people to listen to it as one piece of music," says Patton. "Unless you were swallowing it as one giant pill, it would never have the same effect. And in that regard, it was much more like contemporary classical music. They weren't songs. They weren't pieces. They weren't frames. They weren't little cells of music. I wanted it to really come off as a monolithic, larger than life experience, like sitting on the operating table or anything else. I wanted it to be long, drawn out and painful."The recording process might have been nearly as agonising as the listening experience. "It had a zillion parts, and there were only certain sections where knew what the final arrangement was going to be," Patton recalls. "And I kind of kept them in the dark about it. I said, 'Don't worry about it, you'll hear it in the end and let's just do these' - I don't know, it was divided into maybe 50-something parts, some of which were band pieces but a lot of them weren't. Most of them were overdubs on top of things that I'd done at home. I didn't want it to sound like a rock band, I didn't want it to sound like us. I wanted it to sound like a contemporary music ensemble. So we basically rented a bunch of instruments. I had Dave playing mostly gongs and orchestral percussion."

The brand new Fantomas disc, Suspended Animation, couldn't be more different from its predecessor. A collection of 30 staccato noise-bursts, one for each day in the month of April, it is packaged with a lavish calendar/booklet, illustrated by Japanese artistYoshitomo Nara, and the sounds are even more bizarre and compelling than the packaging. It's a sort of second cousin to Naked City's- infamous 1988 thrash jazz collage, Torture Garden, except that where the Zorn disc pinballed through every style of music under the sun, Suspended Animation mostly vacillates between furious Grindcore and the swoops, squiggles and springs of cartoon music. In addition to Patton's hyperactive vocals, samples from children's Speak & Spell toys are heard, spelling out the word Fantomas and telling the listener to sing a song, or play again. It even ends with the sampled voice of Bugs Bunny, from the toon classic What's Opera, Doc?. The range of influences, from Spike Jones to Napalm Death, and the way they've been totally subsumed into Mike Patton's vision, is almost panic-inducing. It's impossible to hear everything Fantomas are doing with one listen. As he says himself, even their more lighthearted moments (and he claims Suspended Animation is "our Romper Room-style, caffeinated children's record") teeter on the brink of sonic overkill. Like Grindcore maniacsAgoraphobic Nosebleed, who pack their 45-second songs with answering machine messages, blasting drum machines, sampled rants from cult horror movies and unearthly screeches, Fantomas attack from all sides at once, with the precision of a sharpshooter on crystal meth. The mind-boggling discipline required to execute their manoeuvres is just one more thing that sets them apart from any other musical unit around. All the more so, when one reflects that Delirium Cordia and Suspended Animation were recorded in the same block of sessions. "We were bouncing back and forth, depending on what instruments were around or what people were around, the entire time," Patton says. "We'd do a cartoonish band piece for the newest record, then ten minutes later we'd be working on a drone for the Delirium record. The only record I really had mapped out was Delirium, and I knew I'd have a little time to work out the specifics of the children's record."It would be journalistically convenient, at this point, to attempt some kind of rationalisation - say, that the emergence of Fantômas as a 'real group' (with tours, back catalogue, etc) was what inspired Patton to strike out on a new project that could hardly be more different from Fantômas, by hooking up with some of the US's most dexterous turntable artists: Rob Swift, Roc Raida and Total Eclipse, collectively known as The X-ecutioners. But there's really no larger explanation for the existence of this year's General Patton Vs TheX-ecutioners than the Occam's razor one: it was what he felt like doing."This was something I'd been thinking about for five or six years," he says. "I knew I wanted to make a record with turntables only, andpreferably a crew of a few guys. It took a while to figure out who would be up for this kind of venture. I talked to Q-Bert [DJ with Invisibl Skrateh Piklz], I did a few gigs with some other people here in San Francisco, all of which was great. Then, a couple of years later, Iplayed some live gigs with The X-ecutioners and man, they were up for anything. Absolutely loose, voracious, they had no idea what I was gonna do - I don't think they knew if I was gonna be singing songs, or lyrics or anything, they just said, 'Let's just hit' And theybusted my chops, and were listening, and we really had a nice connection, I felt. We did a few more gigs, and I decided, these are the guys."The move shouldn't shock anyone who's been following Patton's career over the years. From Faith No More's collaboration with Samoan gangsta rappers Boo-Yaa Tribe to David Shea's work on the first Mr Bungle album, turntables have been a frequent presence in his work. The disc, though, is a surprise. It's almost totally free of the masturbatory wiggy-wiggy antics that show up on so many scratch records. Part of this is due to The X-ecutioners, of course, who've always been more interested in layered rhythms than needle-busting antics. But Patton's vision was a subtle one too."I've always been fascinated with the speed with which the turntable can execute," he explains. "It's an incredibly powerful instrument, and most of the time it's used for macho acrobatic displays, and contests. Turntables are used in a really sporting way, and I kinda wanted to use them musically, show them off and really explore the power of them, because I think the speed with which you can change, literally as fast as you can drop a needle is how fast you can move with these things. To me, it's like having the ultimate band behind you. It's like having a million bands behind you. Although it has confrontational, sound clash elements, the ultimate goal was to integrate."Integrate he does - his voice is only discernible on perhaps half a dozen of the album's 23 tracks. On all the others, he might be there, but he's filtered through effects or otherwise relegated to the background. This is deliberate Patton wanted to make his voice sound like another turntable for much of the disc.His next project (as should be obvious at this point, there's always a next project) is a solo album, to be released on Ipecac under the name Peeping Tom. For some reason neither Patton nor I can fathom, this is the project of his that seems to have fans most excited. He's been working on it, off and on, for a few years now; maybe that's the reason for the fascination on Internet message boards. Based on his description, though, it's hard not to imagine widespread confusion, if not disillusionment, greeting the eventual product."It's an exercise," he says. "Can I reel all these impulses in for a three-minute song? And it's proven to be quite a challenge. Verses, choruses, a couple of departure points and wrap it all up in a bow. I'm having a fuckin' blast doing it. Does that mean it's going to get on the radio? Hell, no! "Instead of putting a band together for it," he continues, "l decided to play everything myself, because it's not too technically virtuosic, let's say, and I decided to do it with different producers. I did hire a few different musicians, and there are a fewguest vocalists and whatnot, but for the most part it's me collaborating with different producers, which I've never really done. Amon Tobin is doing some stuff with me, some of the guys from cLOUDDEAD on the Anticon label, Dan The Automator's doing a few - who else? Muggs from Cypress Hill, Richard Devine... It's a beat driven record for sure. But by the same token, there's a ballad thing or two, there's choir stuff, there's string sections, I'm doing a duet with Bebei Gilberto on a Brazilian tune - it gets all over the place. But it has elements of what I hear to be pop and have heard to be pop."Clearly, dependent as it is on technological advances and the aesthetics that have come with them, this is an album that could have been made a decade ago. But there are decisive pitfalls to that approach."Sending files back and through the mail, there's an incredible margin for error," says Patton. "It's not the impersonal part that bothers me, but it's hard to describe the way you think things to sound in a fucking email, or even over the telephone. The one good thing is, with all the time that's elapsed, I've got over 30 pieces, which is enough for two records. So that's the bright side.Patton's flexibility and relentless creativity are unique in contemporary music, rock or otherwise. What's fascinating is that he's managed to retain a fanbase while pursuing so many seemingly oppositional and quixotic projects. Of course, that fanbase isn't necessarily one many artists would choose. A visit to Ipecac's online message board reveals a disturbing high number of people who seem to view the ability to offend passers-by with one's musical selections as prima facie evidence of intellectual superiority. Patton takes it all in his stride, though."I learned long ago that there's absolutely no control I have over it," he says. "They're like relatives out there - you can't choose 'em. A lot of people assume that if I'm doing something that isn't 'fuck you' from top to bottom then I've lost my edge, or there's nothing of interest about what I'm doing anymore." He's somewhat obligated to be forgiving of his fans, since by his admission, he's only recently begun to outgrow his own fuckhead phase. "When I was younger, we would put ourselves in compromising positions," he recalls, "like opening for Billy Idol or Robert Plant, when conventional wisdom would say, 'Why? Are you gonna sell any more records? Are you gonna make a lot money? No, there's nothing good that's gonna come out of it. We did get off on being in those positions. And it does teach you some sort of militaristic kit endurance, when whiskey bottles are flying past your head and 50,000 people are booing you. I've been in that situation with lots of bands, and it's been uplifting in a strange, sort of teenage way. It's us versus them, and fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. But as you get older - although I'm sure I'll be in more positions like that - that becomes less and what it's about for me. Like I say, my music these days is problematic enough. It's hard enough just get it played right. The rest of it becomes less andless important. You've gotta tune out the bullshit once the bullshit outweighs what's going on, it's to pull the plug and move on."So who knows? Maybe Mike Patton's fans will not only continue to follow him, but even catch up with him one of these days. Whether the larger music world will ever fully come to grips with his achievements is less predictable. But he's so used to being on the outside, he probably wouldn't come in if he was invited."I've come to a point in my life where I've realised that nothing I do is going to be straight ** pure or fit in a specific genre or even be well-liked by the masses," Patton concludes. "I know it's always going to have a freakish hybrid or some weird fingerprint on it, and it's beyond my control and I completely accepted it and am very comfortableit now. In a sense, that's why I started my own record label. I'm moving forward and trying my best to ** my own little world, because I know that no matter how hard I try, that's the only way for me. I'm a ** and people, no matter what they say or do, can ** change so much. You gotta accept who you are."

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